Algernon Charles Swinburne

Dedication - Poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne

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THE SEA gives her shells to the shingle,The earth gives her streams to the sea;They are many, but my gift is single,My verses, the firstfruits of me.Let the wind take the green and the grey leaf,Cast forth without fruit upon air;Take rose-leaf and vine-leaf and bay-leafBlown loose from the hair.

The night shakes them round me in legions,Dawn drives them before her like dreams;Time sheds them like snows on strange regions,Swept shoreward on infinite streams;Leaves pallid and sombre and ruddy,Dead fruits of the fugitive years;Some stained as with wine and made bloody,And some as with tears.

Some scattered in seven years’ traces,As they fell from the boy that was then;Long left among idle green places,Or gathered but now among men;On seas full of wonder and peril,Blown white round the capes of the north;Or in islands where myrtles are sterileAnd loves bring not forth.

O daughters of dreams and of storiesThat life is not wearied of yet,Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,Félise and Yolande and Juliette,Shall I find you not still, shall I miss you,When sleep, that is true or that seems,Comes back to me hopeless to kiss you,O daughters of dreams?

They are past as a slumber that passes,As the dew of a dawn of old time;More frail than the shadows on glasses,More fleet than a wave or a rhyme.As the waves after ebb drawing seaward,When their hollows are full of the night,So the birds that flew singing to me-wardRecede out of sight.

The songs of dead seasons, that wanderOn wings of articulate words;Lost leaves that the shore-wind may squander,Light flocks of untameable birds;Some sang to me dreaming in class-timeAnd truant in hand as in tongue;For the youngest were born of boy’s pastime,The eldest are young.

Is there shelter while life in them lingers,Is there hearing for songs that recede,Tunes touched from a harp with man’s fingersOr blown with boy’s mouth in a reed?Is there place in the land of your labour,Is there room in your world of delight,Where change has not sorrow for neighbourAnd day has not night?

In their wings though the sea-wind yet quivers,Will you spare not a space for them thereMade green with the running of riversAnd gracious with temperate air;In the fields and the turreted cities,That cover from sunshine and rainFair passions and bountiful pitiesAnd loves without stain?

In a land of clear colours and stories,In a region of shadowless hours,Where earth has a garment of gloriesAnd a murmur of musical flowers;In woods where the spring half uncoversThe flush of her amorous face,By the waters that listen for lovers,For these is there place?

For the song-birds of sorrow, that muffleTheir music as clouds do their fire:For the storm-birds of passion, that ruffleWild wings in a wind of desire;In the stream of the storm as it settlesBlown seaward, borne far from the sun,Shaken loose on the darkness like petalsDropt one after one?

Though the world of your hands be more graciousAnd lovelier in lordship of thingsClothed round by sweet art with the spaciousWarm heaven of her imminent wings,Let them enter, unfledged and nigh fainting,For the love of old loves and lost times;And receive in your palace of paintingThis revel of rhymes.

Though the seasons of man full of lossesMake empty the years full of youth,If but one thing be constant in crosses,Change lays not her hand upon truth;Hopes die, and their tombs are for tokenThat the grief as the joy of them endsEre time that breaks all men has brokenThe faith between friends.

Though the many lights dwindle to one light,There is help if the heaven has one;Though the skies be discrowned of the sunlightAnd the earth dispossessed of the sun,They have moonlight and sleep for repayment,When, refreshed as a bride and set free,With stars and sea-winds in her raiment,Night sinks on the sea.